through this process in one piece, okay? That’s it.”
Bruce stood in place.
“Good luck,” the man said again to him. He enunciated as if for a child and drew closer to the wheelchair, touching its back with his hand. “God bless.” This last phrase he practically spat at Bruce, who recognized it as his dismissal.
I don’t believe in God, Bruce wanted to say. He blinked. He felt like a subject of hypnosis who’d been abruptly woken. Of course: his misfortune was a contaminant to these people, worse by far than his meddling had been. He had both courted and been bracing himself against their pity, but he hadn’t anticipated such obvious anger. Bruce could feel the couple willing him out of their vicinity, as if the bad voodoo of his own experience here could hurt them. Ted was not going to let this happen.
“Sorry,” Bruce said. “Okay.”
“Great.”
“Okay.”
It took no small amount of will to make his body turn and resume walking. And as much as the power of the information he held in him threatened to best him and declare its own, anarchic freedom, he didn’t fling a word about Charlotte over his shoulder as he moved down the hall. In the ears of these people her name and fate would ring like a spell, a jinx, the designation of an ancient devil whose name must never, under any circumstances, be spoken. Bruce knew this, and his hands shook with the wish to make them recoil, but an equal part of him knew that as the steward of the most terrible secret on the ward, the Ring to his hobbit, he was charged with making it all the way to the vending machine, step by step, without once revealing to a stranger that his wife had died on an operating table just out of sight, six days ago, and he was now a single father of two infant boys, and no one was going to go out of their way to give him the space and time to understand this, much less to deal with it, and his previously unlimited choices had narrowed to two: either he could force one of the nonoperating windows here open and let himself fall through space toward the barges on the silent, beautiful river, or go through the rest of his life this way. He picked up his right foot and put it down, his throat itching with sudden thirst.
A GUY from the buy side, who Bruce kept up an e-mail correspondence with at work, had sent him a to-do list when he’d heard. Lionel Tregoe was the father of four, and though Bruce had never met his wife (and had only met Lionel himself twice, both at fairly useless conferences held at the Midtown Sheraton), he suspected she’d been the one to type out the directives he’d been following all week, and he was grateful to her in a way he could never be to those responsible for the strange early deliveries of flowers and personalized children’s clothing, some of them with attached notes of such brevity and cheer that Bruce felt a kind of vertigo at the possibility that the small detail of Charlotte’s death was actually going to be politely ignored in some quarters, at least when it came to the gifts. One friend of Charlotte’s grandmother’s had gone so far as to phone in an order of blue balloons from her remote Kentucky assisted-living facility, though Bruce wasn’t sure how she’d managed it. On the other end of the spectrum, a band from one of Charlotte’s acting classes had already taken it upon themselves to start a blog in tribute to her life, which he couldn’t, and perhaps never could, bear to look at—not least because the people involved, her friend Stephen among them, had always struck him as self-involved twits. But the list was something he could use, and in the eternal space between sunrise and 10:00 a.m., the hour the NICU opened to family visitors, he’d started to go about the tasks it outlined. He had placed an ad for a babysitter in the Irish Echo, posted another on Craigslist, and left a message at a placement agency Lionel’s wife recommended. He had lugged the car seats to his garage and installed them, after a full hour and a half of wrestling, in the backseat of the car. He had made a trip to a terrifying baby emporium the size of three football fields for cases of formula (Charlotte